By Andrew L. Jaffee

I offer praise to the BBC’s correspondent Frances Harrison for calling Iran’s Holocaust denial conference for what it is: a collection of hypocritical, uneducated, hate-mongers hell-bent on undermining Israel’s legitimacy (or, for some, just indulging in anti-Semitism). Here’s a snippet, but you should read the whole article:

…And if there was no Holocaust then there was no justification for the creation of the state of Israel. Therefore Israel was an impostor.

It had all the simplicity of a mathematical proof - refuting the worst genocide in living memory and absolving one of the most evil and wicked regimes in history of its crimes against humanity.

So this was the aim of the conference for Iran - to undermine the very argument for the existence of Israel.

And also to score a few points over the West on the issue of freedom of speech. Every delegate I interviewed congratulated Iran on its commitment to freedom of speech which they said was absent in the West where their comrades were in jail for denying the Holocaust.

They all paid tribute to their new hero, President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. I asked them if they knew about the journalists and students who have been jailed in Iran for pushing the limits of freedom of speech in this country.

They were vague - happy to whitewash Iran without knowing the facts. As a journalist living and working in Iran I found it particularly galling to be told that I had freedom of speech by these people.

Eventually I found one of the movers and shakers behind the conference - a friend of President Ahmedinejad and asked him why there was freedom of speech to deny the Holocaust but not to criticise the Iranian government.

He told me there was complete freedom but the Western media was in the pocket of the Zionists and sent spies to undermine Iran’s national security.

Presumably he meant all the students, bloggers, journalists and human rights lawyers who’ve been jailed here are Zionist spies.

Then he went on to say that the very presence of a BBC correspondent in Iran proved there was freedom of speech. Another twisted logic.

But when all the delegates were taken to see President Ahmedinejad for a mutual admiration session, the BBC, unlike other foreign media, was excluded from covering it. So much for Iranian freedom of speech.